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Please see the query below and send your responses by 28th Feb. Many thanks

Dear all,

I am Nong Thi Ngoc, Advisor at Pro-Poor Partnership for Agro Forestry Development Project in Bac Kan Province, Vietnam. Our project has initiated work towards developing value chains in the community. We have identified two value chains, these are Local Chicken, and Glass Noodles. As we are in the starting phase of developing value chain we need inputs on how to involve more poor people in value chain stages and how to increase economic opportunities for them.

In Project many people talk about gender but in reality they don’t know how to mainstream gender in value chain stages. Though Women Union has organized some gender trainings for project staffs in communes and districts level but the participation of women is very low in project activities. I can say that, women in this province contribute a big role in family’s income by growing rice, maize and feeding livestock, and many other tasks, but they do not get the economic benefits.

I would like to discuss with the group:

1. How to involve poor with the activities of value chain to increase their income?

Dear Jagriti and Nong Ngoc, last year I attended a workshop here in IFAD on gender equity in value chain projects. The most interesting part was the discussion around a new methology developped by Weman (a programme of the Oxfam Novib) together with partners in Uganda, Sudan, Pakistan, Peru and other countries. This new methology is called GALS (Gender Action Learning System) and it has been adopted by many projects already. The nice thing is that it is a comunity-led process.Please refer to this web page to know more about it: http://www.wemanglobal.org . You will find a manual in which this methodology is explained.I hope this is useful, Martina

I can see two approaches in maximising the involvement of poor people and/or women in value chains. One is to maximise the participation women and poor people (the target group) at each stage or function within a value chain. Thus enterprises owned individually or collectively by members of the target group would undertake a number of different functions such as input supply, production, service provision, marketing and processing. An example of such a value chain is the backyard poultry value chain in Bangladesh that has been supported by a number of programmes, including the recently completed IFAD-support Micro Finance and Technical Support Project. Further details on this value chain can be found at: http://www.ifad.org/english/operations/pi/bgd/documents/poultry.pdf.

In many situations it may not be realistic for the target group to take control of a number of different links in a value chain. Small-scale producers (or producer organisations) may not be able to compete in areas such as input supply, marketing and processing. In such a situation, efforts to expand the role of the target group into these other functions may not be sustained once direct project support ends. However value chain interventions can still improve the access to markets for the target group, and so increase their income. Interventions to enable the target group to improve their production to better meet market requirements (in terms of product type, quality, timeliness and volume) can increase the prices that they are paid. One way of doing this is to link producers with buyers, possibly at a later stage in the marketing chain than at which they currently sell (for example a producer group could sell to an urban wholesaler rather than as individuals in a rural assembly market. The result of such as intervention could be to increase the share of the final consumer price that accrues to the target group, and so improve their terms of trade.

Thank you for your responses. This query was run on IFADAsia, APMAS Network email group, and APMAS Gender facebook page. Many responses were received, we have compiled the responses and prepared a summary of discussion. Please look into the resource section of this website for the summary of discussion, or visit to the following link address:

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